With increasing use of virtualization, traditional power management solutions which are designed for monolithic kernels are not applicable for virtualized environments. Power management usually involves a tradeoff with the performance levels offered. The challenge is to figure out how to reduce power consumptions with minimal performance degradation. The challenge is to stay within some given power budget while degrading performance as little as possible.
Modern datacenters manage power at a variety of scales. Traditional Datacenter power management solutions have been based on Platform/Host level and Virtualization level power management. Platform/Host level management solutions do not have the VirtualMachine (VM) level metrics so they can only achieve limited success. Some solutions have combined VM level power management solutions with Platform/Host level power management solutions. But these solutions similarly do not take into consideration application level metrics and so the accuracy of predictions and the accuracy of control is limited.